...An article in Gazzetta dello Sport on Wednesday claimed that no fewer than 1,200 such electronic motors have been sold in Italy in recent years.

Gazzetta adds that the technology continues to develop and that since 2011, a system that sees motors linked to heart-rate monitors has been in vogue, with the motor kicking in once the riders goes above a certain heart-rate. The Italian newspaper also writes of another, Bluetooth system, that can be operated remotely.

Good to see the teams getting the punishment as it's not an individual cheat in the big leagues. Sunday morning coffee shop world championships would be a different matter and it would earn you a pretty swift ban from those groups as well

I must confess, I laughed at all the conspiracy theories around the videos of Cancellara and Hesjedal "motorized" bicycles. In future I might be more open to the theories.

The definition of technological fraud looks pretty broad. I wonder if a team could get banned for 6 months because they try bending the rules in more traditional ways, e.g. Bike 1gramme too light, bars 1mm too narrow

slidecontrol wrote:how long will a frame last with 200w leaning on that little pin through the seat-tube?

200W is input. The motor puts out about 100W at the crank. At 70rpm that is 100Nm, which puts 60kg of force on the pin. The pin is also an adjusting screw to get the pinion gear positioned with the right gap. That is asking a great deal from a 4-5mm hole in a very thin seat tube. I reckon in practice they would add a clamp and use that for the pin to push and twist against.

For pro tour riders to use it though, firstly, they would have to install the battery in the downtube. Secondly, they would have to have a seriously light build to come in at 6.8kg with motor and batteries, and surely anything over this at the weigh in would be suspicious?Could this be a factor in the UCI looking at lowering the minimum weight?

Nah it is easy to detect a motor by other means and even 1kg extra on a TdF bike would be obvious. Deniability is another huge problem, you can't say the motor was an accidental contaminant of your beef and that the whole mechanical team didn't know about it.

Reducing the 6.8kg limit sounds more like a way to make expensive consumer technologies seem relevant for marketing purposes. 6.8kg bikes will eventually become dangerously cheap. If they get within reach of more than the tiniest fraction of the market then the whole industry has a problem, so the UCI needs to proactively keep the weight limit unobtainable to ordinary humans.Amateurs will not buy ridiculously flimsy and expensive equipment every few years if they can see pros happily riding bikes that are more sturdy.